Perspective check: Most buyers are totally fine with this, because they don’t know how to pop the hood in the first place, and when they do, couldn’t tell you the difference between a tank of wiper fluid and the engine anyways.

Exactly. If you can find a surviving Land Rover from the 70s that hasn’t succumbed to the sheer force of rust from being in and out of hellish locations, there’s a decent chance that it’ll outlast a Range Rover from the aughts.

Around me, I see a lot of people in very beat up, ~10-15 year old Range Rovers that were…

Yeah, I don’t think it’s true of modern Rovers. Having said that, from what I remember, a lot of even the earlier Rovers had dodgy electrical systems - fairly easy-ish to fix, given that there wasn’t a ton of wiring, but the problem is that today, obviously, the systems are a lot more complicated and wires go a lot…

I mean, that’s also true in cities.... Someone on my blog has an old Mercedes from the era when those giant rubber bumpers were mandatory, and I often look at that car in envy, and I don’t even park on the street!

I’ve heard that that’s not really true of modern Land/Range Rovers as they’ve adopted pretty much all the modern tech that you’d expect would be hard for someone with a small toolbox in the jungle to be able to fix.

Reverse: From the History.com link:

I don’t think there’s much additional data that’ll be collected, given that most users have Google Maps installed, turn on location services, and many use Maps for navigation.

Urban delivery trucks are perfect for plug-in hybrid or full-electric vehicles. I’d be very surprised if most of them did 150 miles a day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them never hit 30 mph.

You don’t need Google for that: GM’s new infotainment system will let you order food. I don’t think that there’s that much additional privacy loss, since most people turn on location services on their phones and keep them in the car.

I’ve said this a couple of times in other comments, but I think it was a budgetary concern that necessitated that the episode be so dark: It meant they never had to show the entire CGI army of differently sized/shaped skeletons, and it meant that most of the time, when we saw a bunch of “wights,” they were actually…

Ridesharing is generally bad marketing for a given car, considering that most of the models listed really put driver ergonomics first and the back seat last (hello, Prius V). It’s how I learned to hate Nissan Jukes: Never driven one, never been in the front seat of one, but I’ve been in a couple Jukes as an Uber…

True, and the radar is useful at understanding what’s in front of the vehicle (and possibly, depending on the way the AI works, in “tagging” an object, so it can then be tacked optically from the sides/rear as the car passes).

Sure - I can totally see ways where a vision-only system becomes reliable and cheaper to implement than a vision + other sensor system, but I can also see ways where we get flooded with cheap LIDAR sensors to the point where not including them becomes ridiculous.

Well, that may be how it’ll start, but there’s realistic ways that the technology could scale (essentially, by using the kinds of things that make chips cheap to mass-produce). Even getting the cost of the system down really could help.

TOTALLY agree. I’ve taken shortcuts with code before - “eh, let’s just get this to work with the sample file then I’ll fix it later” is a common refrain in my head - and it’s always a bad idea.

Technically, yes, but sometimes it’s used to describe situations where the system isn’t currently working but might be fixable if you say, flash new firmware on it.

You’re missing the point. A modern car’s screen doesn’t just show the current radio station or track, it’s a full on infotainment system, showing the driver information about the car’s condition.

The solution is like coming up with a healthy diet: A little bit of everything, but using the “worst” stuff only in moderation. Moving a single human around in a box that’s 15 feet long x 6 feet wide and weighs a ton and a half is never going to work en masse for dense urban areas.

Not to get nitpicky, but LIDAR is an optical system, using lasers, it’s just that way, you get fast and accurate distance information.

To be fair, things have changed since you were a kid. The CARD Act basically raised the (no-cosigner) age of getting credit to 21, and for some people growing up in low-income households, parents might not be able to cosign. I’m not sure if secured credit cards - exactly what they sound like, where you’ve got a…